Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Proving that sometimes free distribution can yield benefits, Tor Books has been giving away one of their titles each week on Kindle. Last week it was John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos, the first part of a trilogy. Having just finished Nixonland, I was in need of some lighter fare, and I gave it a shot. Then, because I'm a sucker for pulp trilogies, I bought and read the other two Chaos books.
At that point, some parts of the narrative irritated me. So I decided to look Wright up, first via Wikipedia, which then led me to an interview with the man and his Livejournal. This may have been a mistake: both reveal Wright as a tremendously unpleasant person.
It's not just that he's a blowhard, because many writers are. And it's not just that he's my political opposite, or that he's zealously converted from atheism to catholicism. Those are jarring, but they don't break the novels. Reading his online rants, on the other hand, was more distressing. Wright refers to women with extremely regressive phrasing, including the description of women engaging in premarital sex as "unpaid whores." He's also fervently homophobic, referring to affection between gay people as (I quote from memory, but it's close) "something from which normal people naturally recoil in revulsion."
Understand that to me these are not "political" issues. CQ asks its employees, rightfully so, to avoid partisan debate. But I see these as questions of human rights: Wright is not even discussing something like gay marriage or abortion, on which unreasonable people might disagree. He's just outright stating that sexually active women and gay people are monsters.
Needless to say, my perspective on the books is now a little soured. I believe I told Belle I'd kind of like to pack them up and send them back to him.
I felt bad about this, honestly. I don't want to be one of those people who pre-judges their media consumption based on the personal leanings of the artist--reviewing movies based on the trailers, for example, as the hapless targets of Roy Edroso's Alicublog have been known to do. Good rhetorical practice is supposed to mean that the speaker's own views are irrelevant to the argument (although I am also partial to Daniel Davies' statement that there's no fancy Latin term for "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt").
And besides, fiction isn't an argument, is it? Surely it does fiction a disservice to throw it into a flat ideological viewpoint with the rest of the spin?
Well, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Fiction can, after all, be an argument. It can be powerful and appropriate--To Kill A Mockingbird comes to mind. Other times, embedding rhetoric in fiction can be disastrous. I'm as big a fan of Iain Banks as you're likely to find, and I probably agree with much of his politics, but even I am put off by his occassional injections of partisan speechmaking in his mainstream fiction--particularly to the detriment of The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Dead Air.
Indeed, I believe that even viewpoints I disagree with can support and enrich fiction. I started thinking last night about C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, for example. I loathe Lewis's non-fiction and essay writing, which I consider intellectually sloppy and manipulative. But I read the Narnia stories as a kid, even after learning that they're filled with the same views that generated Lewis's non-fiction output, and enjoyed them. I suspect I'd find them readable today. Lewis was not much of an original thinker, but he was a pretty good storyteller, and his ideology does give the books a richness--particularly since he seems to use them as much to explore that ideology as to expound on it. Understanding Lewis's perspective, even if one disagrees with it, allows the reader a deeper and more interesting perspective on the stories, but they're still fine children's stories without it.
The inverse of Lewis is Ayn Rand. Rand also espouses a philosophy with which I personally disagree. But she commits a greater sin: she simply can't write. Her books are compelling fiction the way a rainbow trout is a compelling public speaker. I don't hate Rand because she started Objectivism. I hate her because I read 700 pages of Atlas Shrugged, at which point I lapsed into a coma and had to be nursed back to health through gentle readings of early-era Heinlein.
Perhaps this is where I find most fault with the combination of Wright's viewpoints with his fiction. Without knowing how Wright looks at the world, his books are decent reads that suffer from some overcooked prose and cardboard characterizations, along with a few troubling details or plot devices (I felt similarly about his earlier work, in case anyone suspects sour grapes). Learning about his ideology (particularly his outlook on women--unsurprisingly, homosexuality is largely absent from the Chaos books) does not enrich the reading experience, but heightens those unsettling moments that might otherwise have been discounted in the final analysis: the disjointed sexual scenes and obsession with submission, the heroine's bizarre lack of personal agency (despite her idolization of great explorers), the reinforcement of domestic female stereotypes, shout-outs to Margaret Thatcher...
When I started looking for New Dissent links, one of the more insightful blogs I ran across was Ethan Zuckerman's "My Heart's in Accra." Zuckerman is interested in breaking people of their homophily--love of the same--and in that spirit he started the Global Voices Online aggregator of commentary from around the world. But of course, there's also a kind of homophily in American life--the kind of partisan cultural split hinted at by Nixonland. I am not terribly good at breaking out of that homophily. Too much of my non-fiction reading tends to fit my existing worldview, and I should probably work on expanding that range.
For entertainment, however, I've tried to be more open: I don't boycott movies because I disagree with their stars, or games just because I disagree with their representatives (Sins of a Solar Empire publisher Stardock is run by a rabid neo-conservative). Within certain limits, I'd hope to extend the courtesy of art over politics, as with Lewis. I've never been really sure what those limits would be--where I would draw the line at the cash register. I suppose if nothing else, I owe Wright thanks for helping to more concretely identify the boundaries I don't want to cross.
18:49 x Thomas x /fiction/litcrit x link x 3 comments
Little Brother is Atlas Shrugged for teenage crypto-freaks. It's too long, too preachy, and too self-aware to function as a decent piece of fiction, and it's too frothing to convincingly act as rhetoric. It will probably be a huge hit online.
I'm unhappy that I feel this way, because I really did enjoy Cory Doctorow's previous book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Although it too had its moments of "Look! A tech issue that Cory Doctorow thinks is cool!", the writing elsewhere more than made up for the awkward shoe-horning of Boing Boing material into the story, and there were decent narrative excuses for that material's presence.
Not so with Little Brother, which is explicitly attempting to be a primer on data privacy issues for 15-year-olds. Like most young adult fiction with a message, it fails on several levels: its hero is gratingly eager and overcompetent, the voice is an embarrassing imitation of "youth", and the villains are cardboard cutouts. I think the last point is the most annoying, because to me it's insulting to the reader. By ignoring many of the deeper political implications of the issues it raises, and reducing them instead to "bad people want to spy on us," Little Brother actually does a disservice to its readers.
Shrill. Shrill is the word I'm looking for. Little Brother has a kind of desparation to it, clearly informed by Doctorow's own feelings on data privacy issues. And while there are some readers who may respond to that, who may get a kick out of the step-by-step instructions for fighting The Man, I thought I would never be able to struggle through the last hundred pages of it. It's hard to say whether I would have felt the same way as a teenager--I used to read Piers Anthony, after all. I don't even know what I would recommend instead, but there's got to be something better than this. Maybe Doctorow can even write that book, now that he's gotten this one out of his system.
14:34 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/doctorow_c x link x 2 comments
Digital Shelf: Nerds Like Recursion Edition
So here's another small gripe in an otherwise happy experience: Kindle OS updates bring with them new screensaver images--the pictures that take over the screen when the Kindle is locked. Many of these have been of famous authors. Of those, only one of them (Maya Angelou) has been a person of color, and all of them (as far as I can remember) have been from English-speaking countries. This is a little bit unfortunate on an e-book platform where the back of it has been plastered with letters of about a million alphabets, paying homage to writing systems all over the world.
The reason for the title of the post, of course, is that there's a certain redundancy to reading David Anderegg's Nerds in electronic form. Anderegg, a child psychologist, basically takes a look at the concept of "a nerd," how it affects children, and what people can do about it. It's not a bad book, and raises some interesting points, but it's also a little fluffy and scatterbrained in parts. My favorite chapter was the discussion of autism, Asperberger's, the misdiagnosis and overmedication of both in children, and their usage as signifiers of unhealthiness and sickness on the part of nerds.
Grey, by Jon Armstrong, is a weird book. It's also free from publishers Night Shade Books, so it has that going for it. I can't necessarily recommend it, but at this price all you've got to lose is your time. So if you think you might like a dystopian sci-fi fashion-centric family drama, it might be worth checking out.
Adam-Troy Castro's Emissaries from the Dead is somewhat like the Takeshi Kovacs books I like so much--a murder mystery in a sci-fi, slightly transhumanist setting. The resolution of the actual mystery could stand to be a bit more satisfying, but the pace moves briskly and it has a few twists and turns up its sleeve. The book is billed as "an Andrea Cort novel" which I assume means that sequels will follow. I'd probably give one of them a shot.
On a much more grounded note, I highly recommend Bob Harris's Who Hates Whom: Well Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up - A Woefully Incomplete Guide. It's a world tour of conflict and war, essentially. Harris is a former Jeopardy champion and comedian, the latter of which gives the book the light touch that's needed to keep it from being a mindbogglingly-depressing 200 pages. I felt a little bit guilty about laughing at it sometimes, honestly. But the historical perspective is quite well done. It's amazing to read (or to be reminded) how many countries have been undone by the legacy of colonial invaders who simply redrew borders on a whim.
Polaris, by Jack McDevitt, is another sci-fi mystery (sensing a theme?), but adds a dash of archeology. Notable mainly because the protagonist, pilot Chase Kolpath, is basically a Dr. Watson figure: she's the assistant for the sleuthier character, and that changes the tone from the average potboiler. Well written, but it telegraphs its twist from a mile away. I've read other McDevitt books before, and they always strike me as solid but not earthshattering.
One of the best observations in Jennifer Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles comes early: "Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," Lee points out. But there are more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonalds, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined. "How often do you eat apple pie?" she asks. "How often do you eat Chinese?" Although I could pick structural nits (the book reads more like a series of magazine pieces loosely tied together), overall it's both thought-provoking and deftly told (see her comparison of Chinese restaurants and open-source software). A cool look at a cuisine that's American in everything but name.
Shopping for God, by James Twitchell, is a look at the commercialization of Protestantism in America--both in terms of megachurches as well as the degree to which our religious culture is a marketplace. Along with digressions into artifacts like those movable-letter church signs (which are both a decent business as well as a marketing tool for individual churches), Twitchell spends a lot of time explaining church history through an economic/branding lens. I probably would have found this more captivating if I were the kind of person who's nostalgic for the classic small American church tradition.
I suspect that David Mamet may be insane, but I've enjoyed a few of his films, so during a local non-profit's bookstore partnership day, I bought Bambi Vs. Godzilla, which is Mamet's guide to the film industry. It consists of roughly four equal parts: Jewish trivia, lessons in filmmaking, film criticism, and madness. About what you'd expect, in other words. Say what else you like about him, but the man can certainly write, and it might be worth purchasing on that strength alone.
18:35 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/kindle x link x 0 comments
Taking the Public out of Publication
File under "seemed like a good idea at the time": Amazon's Digital Text Platform is a disaster.
In theory, it's great: give anyone the ability to self-publish through Amazon's Kindle Store. It democratizes publishing. It makes more content available on Kindle, and boosts Amazon's numbers for available titles. And it offers a new revenue stream for writers, which I can see as a good thing.
But in practice, it means that any quality controls have been removed--and you don't realize how valuable the QA functions of editors and publishing houses really are until you get rid of them. I am glad that Paul and Bobbie Abell can write about Our Trip to Israel and distribute it to their friends. Likewise, perhaps USWEBGURU really does know How to Make Money on the Internet (in addition to their numerous publications as USHEALTHEXPERT and USDIETEXPERT). And maybe there really is a market for erotic short fiction written by women with terrible lingerie headshots, I don't know. But I didn't want to know, either.
We already have a place where anyone can publish their work online, including in a Kindle-ready .mobi format. It's called the Internet. And I celebrate its openness, I really do. But when I hit the Kindle Store to check for new publications, I don't really want to have to skip past pages of self-published short fiction of unknown quality in order to find something that (at some point) has crossed an editor's desk.
Frankly, even on the web, we rely on editors. How did you find this page? You probably got referred here at some point by another blog whose judgement you trust (and which now you are doubting), or you know me personally. But you had a way of evaluating this content.
Amazon isn't helping matters by dumping tons of public-domain titles into the Kindle store every day with a "new" publication date, using incredibly tasteless public domain images as the "covers" for these titles. Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that I can buy Balzac with better formatting than the Project Gutenberg version for only $1. But it's not a new title, and I shouldn't have to see it when sorting by publication date.
At some point, I'm guessing when Amazon has sufficient title coverage that they're not insecure about it, the Digital Text Platform fluff will be cordoned off. You could do it now--just add an option to filter out any books that don't have a printed version, and that would solve the problem for me. And these problems don't cripple the store now. It's still useful. But it makes browsing for books less enjoyable than it should be. What Amazon attempted to do--opening up the book market to the masses--was a respectable goal. It just hasn't turned out to be a practical one for readers.
12:51 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 0 comments
In which I make a few specific observations about the Kindle, and also briefly glance over my reading material therein:
I still don't have any problems with the buttons at all, so I don't know what your problem is, butterfingers. But I do have a couple of gripes. First, it would be nice, once I've decided from a sample book to buy the full version, if the Kindle would get rid of the sample for me, instead of making me delete it manually. Also, the selection is getting better, but I still can't guarantee that if I see something great in a bookstore that I'll be able to buy it digitally. Other than that, still a great experience. Let's move on to the reviews.
99 Coffins is a sequel to David Wellington's first novel, 13 Bullets. It's billed as a "historical vampire story," which I guess is true, and the historical twist is fairly clever. That said, I should still have my head checked out for reading vampire fiction. The mutilation fetish in these kinds of books gives me the willies.
The Automatic Detective seemed like a cute idea: a robot death machine changes its mind about the whole "lead the army of doom" idea, becomes a cab driver, gets entangled in a kidnapping mystery. But that's about all it ends up being: a cute idea, supported by a lot of well-meaning fluff. For better future noir, I always recommend Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music.
Or you could read Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, including Broken Angels and Woken Furies. The Kovacs books hew closely to a lot of noir conventions, like the constant abuse taken by the hero, and then throw a loop at it: they're set in a future where people are backed up into chips and can just download into a new body when they die, or whenever they feel like it. What I like about these books, especially the first, is that they're detective/adventure novels first and transhuman gobbledygook second. Unlike a lot of entries into this subgenre, Morgan isn't trying to make his characters into some kind of new creature, as often happens to Charlie Stross or John C. Wright. Anyone who's read Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler would recognize Takeshi Kovacs and the various players he encounters. People just die a little harder this time around.
After Dark, Haruki Murakami's most recent book, is a pretty slight little story about a Japanese love hotel, a pair of sisters, and a genial trombone player. It kind of wanders around, and in the end I'm not sure it actually went anywhere, but like all Murakami it's deftly written magical realism and some good dialogue. If you're new to his work, I'd recommend Norwegian Wood instead.
My father suggested J. Maarten Troost's The Sex Lives of Cannibals, and it is indeed pretty good. The memoir of a post-graduate slacker who ends up traveling to a tiny island country in the Pacific when his girlfriend gets an aid job there, it's written with a kind of dry conversational humor that's consistently funny, and sometimes hilarious. The sections on Troost's attempts to spay his adopted cat and dogs, in particular, had me laughing out loud until Belle demanded to know what was so funny.
At the other extreme of climate and tone, The Terror is a fictional account of a real historical expedition that went searching for the Northwest Passage and never returned. The crews of two ships are stranded in the ice, unfamiliar with their surroundings but too proud to turn back until it's too late. The familiar stories--desparation, disaster, mutiny, and even cannibalism--all crop up, exacerbated (and here's where it tips from historical fiction to horror) by a huge, white monster stalking the dwindling party. It's a grim read, but compelling. Having read Simmons' Hyperion books, I knew he could do gothic horror, and The Terror doesn't suffer from the outlandish plot twists that rendered The Fall of Hyperion nearly incoherent.
The less said about The Swarm and Ill Wind, the better. Both are pulp, which I happen to particularly enjoy (the action movies of literature, I believe), but both are also pretty bad at it. The Swarm makes the mistake, early in its eco-thriller plotline, of repeatedly invoking movies with similar plotlines, like Deep Impact, Armageddon, and The Abyss. It's a bad idea to remind the reader that there are other, better versions of your story out there--and when one of those involves Ben Affleck and Michael Bay, that's saying kind of a lot.
As for Ill Wind, it annoyed me by using one of the tropes of lazy writers everywhere--a Hispanic character with a fiery temper who tosses a couple of Spanish words into every paragraph, just in case we forgot that they are, in fact, a spicy Latino stereotype. Those unfortunate enough to have read one of William Shatner's ghostwritten Tekwar novels (cut me a break, I was thirteen and worked in a used bookstore) will recognize this age-old device common to writers who have never actually met a Hispanic American. I realize I'm not reading War and Peace here, but I don't think a hint of self-awareness is too much to ask.
Finally, the best deal I've gotten on the Kindle so far has also been one of the better books I've read. Since I've been enjoying The Wire, I figured I'd try some of writer/producer George Pelecanos' crime novels, starting with The Night Gardener. At $3.99, it's about $3.50 off the paperback price, which is not bad at all. The story starts off looking like a typical serial-killer stomp set in 1985, but then jumps ahead to the present day and proceeds to continually subvert the expected narratives. Over and over again, Pelecanos raises a standard detective novel cliche (the charismatic rebel cop hero, his by-the-book partner, the killer with a gimmick, the old cop obsessed with his last case) and then obliterates it so gently that you might not even notice until you've finished the last page.
Oh, late addition: I almost forgot that I got halfway through Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia before I had to just give up on it. It is a nice feature that the Kindle will always remember my bookmark, even if I delete the book, in the unlikely event that I ever decide to return to it. But until there's also a feature in the software that will make Sacks' book something other than a list of quirky headcases, one after another, I doubt it'll come to that. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat while I was in college and don't remember it being this tedious, so either that was a really good lecture or Sacks' writing style has really taken a turn for the worse.
19:42 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/kindle x link x 0 comments
The problem with me reviewing the Kindle is that I'm the central section of the target audience's venn diagram. I love ebooks, I read constantly, and I've got the disposable income to spring for a $400 device in the hopes that it will, eventually, prove economical. What I'm trying to say is: look, I really dig the thing, but that doesn't mean it's made for you. That said, I think the Gamers With Jobs review is excellent, and basically spot-on.
Jeff Bezos says he wants it to disappear while you're reading, and for the most part it works as advertised. After half an hour, you get the timing of the page turn down so that it blanks the screen while your eyes are traveling back up to the top of the page, and you stop noticing the delay. The reading quality of the display is otherwise very, very good, which you'd expect from e-ink. The "Whispernet" (which I guess sounds better than saying "Sprint cell phone modem," perhaps because most people hate cell phone companies) is also fast and effective, but it does take a big chunk out of the batteries, particularly when first activated. I leave it off probably 99% of the time.
A lot of reviews have been critical of the Kindle for the placement of the page-turning buttons. I think they're overreacting. The main time when I see them hit accidentally is when I hand the device to someone else--they're not expecting the borders to be sensitive. But when I pick it up myself, there are plenty of places to grab it, especially since I lock the buttons (by hitting the ALT and Text Size keys on opposite ends of the keyboard) before I put it down. When holding it, the buttons are actually placed logically: your left hand rests with the thumb able to reach the next page easily, and the previous page with a little bit of a stretch. You can also just hold it with the left hand, and use the right hand for additional support and page turns. Part of the confusion may come from people who expect to be able to read one-handed all the time, which you can do easily left-handed but not so easily with the right. But at the same time, most people do not read books with just one hand--they use two, one to prop it open and one to read pages. The Kindle just mimics this.
As far as the industrial design goes, it does look better in person than it does in a picture. It's still not going to win any design awards, but it is surprisingly thin and light. It's solidly-built and passes the "creak test," so it doesn't look as expensive as it maybe should, but it doesn't feel cheap either. Its case is also better than you'd expect--there's a little tab that slots into a corresponding slot on the Kindle's battery cover and keeps it from sliding out. The LCD roller is a very clever solution to the refresh rate problem, and once you point it out to people they seem to get the hang of it immediately. Some people have claimed that it needs a touch screen. These people are wrong.
The Internet access is unfinished, to say the least. The built-in browser is a variant of Netfront, which long-time PocketPC users will recognize as passable, but not nearly as good as Opera's native offering. It handles Wikipedia just fine, and most blogs load without much trouble. Pages with more formatting may need to be dropped into the single-column rendering mode, which disables Javascript and extra formatting in favor of a simplified view (it's also often shorter). What this mostly does, as far as I'm concerned, is point out just how bad mobile site design is. In any case, web browsing isn't the reason you should buy it, but it doesn't hurt to have it around. I know that Amazon's trying to monetize RSS, but a reader would be a much better addition (as it is to most mobile devices).
I've finished five downloaded books on the Kindle so far, and the experience of buying them and reading them has been smooth. Because the wireless can be hard on the battery, I don't find myself browsing Amazon from the Kindle much, but if I want something directly it's easy to just type it in with the keyboard and grab it. That's assuming that they've got it, of course--the selection is not quite as comprehensive as I'd like it to be yet. Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series, for example, is exactly the kind of disposable pulp that I'd like to read on Kindle, but the second book (and only the second book) is missing, so I'd have to go buy the paper version before I can continue reading them. All of Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books are available, but I still can't buy any Iain Banks. On the other hand, they've got a good choice of Murakami titles. Best-sellers and new books are well-represented, but older titles are less reliable--I went looking for M.T. Anderson's Feed based on a recommendation from a while back, and it's not up yet. And the periodical selection seems weak to me, particularly in magazines: no New Yorker or Harpers?
That's not to say that I can't find stuff to read. I've been using the free samples as a shopping list--if I see something on Amazon and it's available on Kindle, I click the "send sample" button, and it gets downloaded the next time I turn the wireless on. I probably sent 15 titles the other night, just browsing through the virtual stacks. And while I hope it gets more coverage, I'm not unhappy with the selection--even just buying off the bestsellers and the new hardbacks, there's lots of good stuff there and the price discount isn't anything to scoff at.
People tend to forget that real-world selection is nothing special either. The other day I went out to buy a book as a birthday present for one of Belle's friends. We called a couple of stores to see who had it in stock, and then when I got there, they didn't actually have it, so I got to trundle over to another branch and wait in line to buy it. This is not, by the way, an isolated incident: I'm always looking for stuff in the chain bookstores, and have to go to several before I find it, or I resort to Amazon and have to wait a week. I bought the same book that night as a download, and I had it in two minutes. The Kindle's a fine way to read, but for all its flaws I think it's also a better way to buy books in the first place.
So the long and the short of it is that the Kindle is, for me, a success. I think it's better than most reviewers have treated it (the Ars review, for example, is overly harsh). That said, it's basically a $400 wireless bookstore. If you don't see yourself going to the bookstore very often, or if you've got close proximity to a used bookstore, or if you're irrationally attached to the idea of paper, that's a lot of money to spend. I personally love the experience of the Kindle (or more accurately, the lack thereof), and I love the fact that I'm not buying more physical books that I'll read once and then have to find space to store (or haul down to Manassas to sell).
12:38 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 1 comment
More details in a while, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.
23:12 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 2 comments
For my own future reference: a reverse-engineering blogger has gotten shell access to the Kindle's Linux-based OS. The interesting part is the second half, where he publishes an easter egg-like list of keyboard shortcuts, including one that finds the nearest gas stations or restaurants based on the cellular modem's location data.
Amazon really needs to ship my order. I've got a lot of books I want to read, both in the disposable pulp and current affairs categories, and I figure that if I buy them in digital form, the thing will pay for itself in a year.
00:07 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 0 comments
The reaction to the Kindle by Internet pundits seems mixed so far, which is fine--everyone gets an opinion, and most of them are wrong. But what amazes me is the incredible attachment to the printed book. John Gruber, a man who never met a sneer he didn't like, links to one typographer's view:
PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a 'thing' in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. And won't. Certainly not by something that looks like a prop from Charlie's Angels and has, are you ready, a whopping ONE typeface. For everything! Yay!Who would have thought? Someone who makes book covers for a living isn't keen on the idea.
But of course, this is completely wrong. Music hasn't returned to "pure sound" at all, and while it might have started that way it hasn't existed in that form for more than 70 years, since people sold sheet music on the streetcorner. Music is a commodity now, and the iPod didn't change that. If anything, it made it worse.
In fact, the music metaphor works, but not the way the writer clearly hopes. He's expressing a kind of nostalgia for the form of the printed word--hence his distaste for "a whopping one typeface" and the concept of reading on a screen, no matter how good it is (and an e-ink screen is shockingly good). People like this confuse the form of the book with what really makes it important: the information inside. The form is important, granted, since a display that distracts or grates on the eyes prevents you from getting at that information. But it's not the book, any more than a CD is the music.
Insisting that a book has to be on paper is like insisting that music has to be on vinyl, because without the feel of a record's grooves "it's just not the same experience." It was a silly point of view then, and it's a silly point of view now. I'm not saying that the Kindle will change everything, necessarily, but it seems curiously obtuse to insist that the change is never going to come just because you like paper. I like paper too, but I'm not going to insist that there's something magical and perfect about it that will last forever.
Here's the thing: like a lot of other people, I've been reading e-books for years now. Every PDA I've owned, practically my first move has been to put an e-book reader on it. It's incredibly convenient: I bore easily, but I've almost always got something to read. And I'm not really an oddity. Lots of people read onscreen for hours a day--you know, what with the Internet, and all.
I could say a lot of great things about electronic text. I took my current job because journalism is going through this same transition (and not always gracefully), and I wanted to be a part of it. I think it's genuinely important. But I will point out at least one way that the form of a physical book is something not to romanticize:
Yesterday I re-read Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks. It's one of my favorite books, and Banks is one of my favorite authors. Sadly, my copy of Player of Games is stolen. It's a bootleg e-book that I picked up my senior year of college. I wish I could have paid for it--but of course, the book's been unavailable in the US for more than 10 years now. Banks's other titles have been out of print for even longer. For some reason--perhaps because of his outspoken Socialist beliefs--American publishers don't bring most of his stuff here, with the exception of a short-story collection and a couple of the weaker (and less political) novels. Good luck finding him in your average Barnes and Noble.
Now, at the moment Kindle doesn't offer those missing Banks titles either. But that doesn't have to be the case. There's no burden for shipping an e-book, or for "printing" it domestically. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to buy it and give money to my favorite author. That's the whole point of digital distribution--indeed, that's the whole promise of the Internet: it eliminates the physical space that, while traditional, is also cumbersome and prone to interference by powerful actors.
13:22 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 1 comment
Against my better judgement, I'm really interested in Amazon's Kindle ebook. Let's get the objections out of the way first.
First and foremost, it only reads .txt and .azw at the moment, the latter being Amazon's DRM'd file format. No RTF, no PDF, HTML only through the web browser. Second, because its ebook files are protected this way, you can't loan them to someone else or sell them when they're done. There's no used book market for the Kindle.
But I don't think either of those matter, because I doubt they'll actually last. Amazon has stated, obliquely at least, that the platform will open at some point to new applications--but it'll probably be hacked long before that. And there's a fundamental difference between DRM for text and for audio: with audio, stripping DRM often means losing data--burning to a CD and re-ripping, for example, is a lossy process--but stripping DRM off text can usually be done without losing anything. Books that I buy from Amazon will probably be convertible to something else, if I should ever need to do so, the same way that Microsoft's LIT format has now pretty much been cracked open.
It's possible to freak out too much about DRM. The fanatics at Boing Boing, for example, recently had a hissy fit over Amazon's MP3 license, which (in theory) restricts resale. Were they planning on reselling MP3s? Could Amazon actually enforce that? Probably not, to both questions, but that's not stopping people from getting hysterical about it, even though the average user couldn't care less.
The draw of the Kindle, for me, is that I buy a lot of books, and I typically buy them from Amazon. The fact that Kindle is usually cheaper is nice, as is the fact that the books wouldn't take up physical space. Our apartment has a fair share of bookshelves, and they're overflowing at the moment. It would be nice not to have to worry about piling up more dead trees in our limited real estate.
And the free wireless network is also tempting. Despite my disagreement with both its general philosophy and content, you can kill a lot of time with Wikipedia. And an always-on cellular web browser, no matter how basic, is a pretty big value-add. When external applications make their way onto the Kindle--which, again, I think is pretty much near-certain, even if Amazon changes its mind and tries to stop them--it could be a really killer value.
Right now, the only deterrents are the lack of availability and the $400 price tag, and that's probably a good thing. I'd guess we're going to see the Kindle develop over the next 6 months to a year, until it reaches something more like its full potential. At which point I might actually be able to buy one.
All that said, as the title of the post hints, isn't a fire just about the last thing you want your book platform to evoke?
12:14 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 0 comments
